As stated by Goldman, Trotsky’s counsel at Mexico, the letter was addressed to Kamenev, Trotsky, and Y P Smilga. Trotsky explained that, ‘Smilga is an old member of the Party, a member of the Central Committee of the Party and a member of the Opposition, of the center of the Opposition at that time’. The following questioning then took place:
Stolberg: What do you mean by the center of the Opposition? The executive committee?
Trotsky: It was an executive committee, yes, the same as a central committee.
Goldman: Of the leading comrades of the Left Opposition?
Trotsky: Yes.’[220]
Trotsky stated that thereafter he had ‘absolute hostility and total contempt’ for those who ‘capitulated’, and that he wrote many articles denouncing Zinoviev and Kamenev. Goldman read from a statement by prosecutor Vyshinsky at the January 28 session of the 1937 Moscow triaclass="underline"
The Trotskyites went underground, they donned the mask of repentance and pretended that they had disarmed. Obeying the instruction of Trotsky. Pyatakov and the other leaders of this gang of criminals, pursuing a policy of duplicity, camouflaging themselves, they again penetrated into the Party, again penetrated into Soviet offices, here and there they even managed to creep into responsible positions of the state, concealing for a time, as has now been established beyond a shadow of doubt, their old Trotskyite, anti-Soviet wares in their secret apartments, together with arms, codes, passwords, connections and cadres.[221]
Trotsky in reply to a question from Goldman denied any further connection with Kamenev, Zinoviev or any of the other defendants at the Moscow Trials. However, as will be considered below, Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev had formed an ‘anti-Stalinist bloc in June 1932’,[222] a matter only discovered after the investigations in 1935 and 1936 into the Kirov murder.
One of the features of both the first Moscow Trial of 1936 and the Dewey Commission was the allegation that defendant Holtzman, when an official for the Soviet Commissariat for Foreign Trade, had met Trotsky and his son Leon Sedov at the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen in 1932. It is a matter that remains the focus of critique and ridicule of the Moscow Trials. For example one Trotskyite article triumphantly declares: ‘Unbeknown to the prosecutors, the Hotel Bristol had been demolished in 1917! The Stalinist investigators had not done their homework’.[223] Prominent historians continue to cite the supposed non-existence of the Hotel Bristol when Trotsky and his son were allegedly conspiring with Holtzman, as a primary example of the crass nature of the Stalinist allegations. While Trotsky confirmed that he was in Copenhagen at the time of the alleged meeting, the Dewey Commission accepted statements that the Hotel Bristol had burned down in 1917 and had never reopened. The claim had first been made by the Danish newspaper Social-Demokraten shortly after the death sentences of the 1936 trial had been carried out.[224] In response Arbejderbladet, the organ of the Danish Communist Party, pointed out that in 1932 the Grand Hotel was connected by an interior doorway to the café Konditori Bristol. Moreover, both the hotel and the café were owned by a husband and wife team. Arbejderbladet editor Martin Nielsen contended that a foreigner not familiar with the area would assume that he was at the Hotel Bristol.
However these factors were ignored by the Dewey Commission, and are still ignored. Instead the Commission accepted a falsely sworn affidavit by Esther and B J Field, Trotskyites, who claimed that the Bristol café was two doors away from the Grand Hotel and that there was a clear distinction between the two enterprises. Goldman, Trotsky’s lawyer, had stated at the fifth session of the Dewey hearings in Mexico that despite the statements that Holtzman was forced to make at the 1936 Moscow trial that he had met Trotsky at the Hotel Bristol, and was ‘put up’ there, ‘…immediately after the trial and during the trial, when the statement, which the Commissioners can check up on, was made by him, a report came from the Social-Democratic press in Denmark that there was no such hotel as the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen; that there was at one time a hotel by the name of Hotel Bristol, but that was burned down in 1917…’
Goldman sought to repudiate a claim by the publication Soviet Russia Today that stated that the Bristol café is not next to the Grand Hotel, and used the Field affidavit for the purpose, and that there was no entrance connecting the two, the Fields stating,
As a matter of fact, we bought some candy once at the Konditori Bristol, and we can state definitely that it had no vestibule, lobby, or lounge in common with the Grand Hotel or any hotel, and it could not have been mistaken for a hotel in any way, and entrance to the hotel could not be obtained through it.[225]
The question of the Bristol Hotel was again raised the following day, at the 6th session of the Dewey hearings. Such was◦– and is◦– the importance attached to this in repudiating the Stalinist allegations as clumsy. In 2008 Sven-Eric Holström undertook some rudimentary enquiries into the matter. Consulting the 1933 street and telephone directories for Copenhagen he found that◦– the Field’s affidavit notwithstanding◦– the Grand Hotel and the Bristol café were located at the same address.[226] Furthermore, photographs of the period show that the street entrance to the hotel and the café were the same and the only signage from the outside states ‘Bristol’.[227] Again, contrary to the Field affidavit, diagrams of the building show that there was a lobby and internal entrance connecting the hotel and the café. Anyone walking off the street into the hotel would assume, on the basis of the signage and the common entrance, that he had walked into a hotel called Hotel Bristol. Getty states that Trotsky’s papers archived at Harvard show that Holtzman, a ‘former’ Trotskyite, had met Sedov in Berlin in 1932 ‘and gave him a proposal from veteran Trotskyist Ivan Smirnov and other Left Oppositionists in the USSR for the formation of a united opposition bloc’,[228] although Trotsky stated at the Dewey hearings on questioning by Goldman that he had never had any ‘direct or indirect communication’ with Holtzman.
If the statements of Trotsky at to the Dewey Commission and his statements in My Life are considered in the context of the allegations presented by Vyshinsky at the Moscow Trial, a number of conclusions might be suggested:
From 1925 there was a Trotsky-Zinoviev-Kamenev bloc, or an ‘Opposition Centre’, which Trotsky states had an ‘executive committee; which functioned as an alternative party ‘central committee.’”
Although Zinoviev and Kamenev were aligned for a time with Stalin in a troika, they repudiated this in favour of a counter-revolutionary alliance with Trotsky, and spoke at mass demonstrations, along with others such as Radek.
Trotsky subsequently condemned Kamenev, Zinoviev et al as ‘contemptible’ for ‘capitulating’, but Zinoviev, on Trotsky’s own account, was writing to him in November 1928 and warning of what he expected to be Stalin’s attacks.
221
Vyshinsky, ‘Verbatim Report’, 464, quoted by Goldman, The Case of Leon Trotsky, op. cit.
222
Vadim Rogovin, 1937: Stalin’s Year of Terror (Mehring Books, 1998), 63. Note: Mehring Books is a Trotskyite publishing house.
223
R Sewell, ‘The Moscow Trials’ (Part I), Socialist Appeal, March 2000, http://www.trotsky.net/trotsky_year/moscow_trials.html
225
The Case of Leon Trotsky, Fifth Session, April 13, 1937, http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1937/dewey/session05.htm
226
Sven-Eric Holström, ‘New Evidence Concerning the ‘Hotel Bristol Question in the First Moscow Trial of 1936,’ Cultural Logic, 2008, 6.2, ‘The Copenhagen Street Directory and Telephone Directory’.